Elements of Running a Successful Retail Business

All right. Good afternoon everybody. How's everybody doing? Last seminar of the week here in Magic. Good for you guys. Round of applause for everybody to show up. That's awesome. I was, I was not sure. Everybody be hitting the dusty trail and heading home or what? But this is awesome. A great variety of speakers this week and I'm excited to be closing that program. So a little bit about me, who I am. I appreciate you all coming out to support me. I'm sure not many of you know exactly who I am, but I come to you with about 20 years of retail experience. I owned a brick and mortar store in southwest Wisconsin, very rural community, farm community, for many years now. I currently work for a company called the Boutique Hub. Who's heard of the Boutique Hub in here? Woohoo. I see some hubbies. That's awesome. So I'm the director of partnerships and education for the Boutique Hub. And we have Ed Olvera right down here. He is our director of wholesale. He works primarily with the brands. Yes. And he needs a round of applause, right? Yeah, Ed. We like Ed. Everybody likes Ed. So what is the Boutique Hub? The Boutique Hub is, we say it's a three sided marketplace. It is a collaboration of boutique owners, brands and service providers all in one spot to collectively work together, collaborate, network, bring each other together through education and tips and tricks. Basically, as a small independent retailer, it is a way for you to have a voice and a connection to the industry 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whether you're laying in bed at night, going through our closed social media channels, interacting with members from across the country, or you're here at Market in a meetup like we had last night, right down here. Fill the beautiful, beautiful room with amazing boutique owners. We have a trend talk from Kelly Helfman here from Magic and a lot of really awesome educational tips, things like that that we do throughout the year. Those fun events, pop ups. We do market meetups at all the majors, but really our primary focus is to provide you with education. Things that help separate you from the rest of the retailers out there trying to own it, win it on their own, but yet they're sitting there thinking, okay, getting to the middle of February, I need to be starting to think about Valentine's. Nope, that was a while ago. Right. But why are they doing that? Because they're so busy in the grind that all of a sudden they look up one day and say, oh my gosh, it's Valentine's next week. And then they pull up their Facebook and they see a Cover photo of a Christmas tree. Miss that one. We'll do better on the next one. Right. So we do a lot of collaboration, we do a lot of tips. We're all the time sending out market information. Marketing, marketing information. Things to help you be in the know, things to help you be ahead of the game. Right. We're like the coach. We are helping you see the forest through the trees. So that's what we do. With the boutique Hub. I primarily teach retail boot camp, boutique owner basics. We do the best of the year challenges. I help bring in service providers such as like Management One. Who here works with somebody like Management One? Lightspeed Retail Springboard. We work with photographers, we work with, like I said, inventory planners, buyers, LA buyers. We work with all sorts of different services that can help you build your business versus saying, okay, I need a new point of sale. I'm going to look it up on Google. Let's see what Google has to say. No, what you're going to do if you're a boutique hub member is you're going to go to our service provider directory, find a long laundry list of vetted services, you're going to check them out, offer many of them, offer a great discount for you. But then the beauty of the community is you're going to put a post in one of our Facebook groups and say, hey guys, looking for a new point of sale system? I have Shopify for E commerce. What do y' all use? And within minutes you're going to have all these other boutiques that give you tips and tricks and things to look out for, things that have worked anyway. That's the beauty of the boutique hub. So that's what we do. So taking that a step further, like I mentioned, our education, we know that you guys are in this business for many, many reasons. Some of you are in this business because you have a passion for fashion. Some of you are in this business because you just like pretty things, Right? Whatever it is, I guarantee you there's some people in here that there's very few people in here that went into a small business because they like to manage a team and they like to manage bookkeeping. Who here has a love of people managing people, not serving people, like selling beautiful things to them. But you wanted to be a boss and manage people that showed up late, wanted to leave early and didn't ever want to work on weekends or holidays? No, not me neither. Who here went into owning a boutique because you love running numbers? No, not me neither. But you guys, these are some of the non Negotiable things. When Sandy asked me to come speak. I've got to be honest, Sandy was the first person at Magic that I talked to many, many years ago. And I'm going to say it was probably 2008 the first time I came Magic. A little backstory. I worked in my store as an OJT student, which means I'd leave school at noon. I'd go to work at this boutique downtown. You know, I got to unpack boxes. I got to vacuum and dust. I never got to do the window. That was not part of my gig. I earned my way up into that. But anyway, so I worked in OJT student, right, in that role. And I didn't really have a voice, but I learned a lot along the way. Later on, I came back from college, and the lady who owned the store at the time, she always said, sarah, one day, you're going to own this place. So I came back from college, and I'd work on the weekends or I'd work in the summers or whatever it was whenever I was available. And I always kept thinking, I wonder why she doesn't do this. I wonder why the carpet still smells like it did when I was a little girl shopping in here with my mom. I wonder why the ceiling tiles. Those all awful false ceiling tiles. They used to be white. I swear they were. Now they're gray. I wonder if she doesn't replace those. I wonder why. I wonder why, right? Well, I didn't ever ask until I finally came back. I was coaching down south at Oklahoma. I used to coach at a university, and mother of two kids. We needed to get back home to Wisconsin, and so I moved back, bought the store, walked back into the store. Same carpet, same smell, same everything. And the girl that owned it at the time, I said, why don't. Why don't you remodel? Why don't you give this a facelift? She said, oh, I can't afford it. I said, okay. I said, how do we get the Internet? She's like, this was in 2005. And she said, the Internet. I know we're not going to do that. There's no reason to do that. And here I was, living all over the world, and I'm thinking, have you not gotten out of this store since 1992, 93. You know, when we both worked there in high school together, and she looked at me, she kind of was just a little put off by it, but I was like, okay, just offering a suggestion. And there was a lot of different things that she was doing that she'd always done. We're not going to fix it because we've always done it this way. And we're unpacking boxes. And one day I had this conversation with her, and I said, you know, it's a big wide world out there that's going pretty fast. People are emailing, people are building websites. And she's like, oh, we just. We can't do that. We can't do that. Well, anyway, fast forward, I end up buying a business. In 2007, we got the Internet, we started traveling to markets, started emailing vendors. That was very effective. Anyway, we really started to grow, and I realized real fast that there was a lot of things a business owner just didn't have time to do because they were so busy spinning their wheels, trying to stay ahead of the game right now. Back then, there wasn't something like the boutique hub. And honestly, she had never been to a major market like this where there was a group of awesome boutique owners, business owners in one area, one setting. You guys could turn to the neighbor next to you and say, how's business for you? What are the vendors that you're killing it with? What's the biggest mistake you've made? You know why they didn't do that either? It's because it's all about competition. All right? Who can agree with that? Like, a lot of times people don't like to give up their secret sauce. Well, Fast forward to 2020. If we don't start collaborating together and work together, we're going to get overdone by the big dogs. And, you know, the big word is Amazon. So what do we have to do? We have to collectively grow together, build resources, have them at the tips of our fingers, have that knowledge base, have a team that can help us bring us to that next level. So I say all that to tell you that I'm extremely transparent. Since 1993, through coaching in college, running the retail store, now finding myself at the hub, I can tell you I've coached so many different boutique owners along the way. And one reason people continue to want to ask and talk to me and come back to me is I'm super vulnerable and honest about all the stupid stuff I did, all the disasters that I created, you know, the pride that I had in my business. Right. All the mistakes I made. So when Sandy asked me to come and speak, I kind of chuckled because, like I said, she was the very first person I ran into at Magic many, many years ago when I decided I was going to get on A plane and leave rural Wisconsin and fly to Vegas and source out new items for my little bitty hometown store. I should say a little bitty. It was 4,000 square foot, basically department store in our town. It was big, it served a wide variety of customers. But at the same time, we shopped one regional market and we went there twice a year. It's a lot different now, right? So I said, I made a call with Sandy and I said, sandy, I'm gonna need a tour because when I get there, I want to know what I'm doing, I want to get the lay of the land, I want to use my time wisely, right? So I met Sandy. I mean, a wild spitfire lady, she still is today, God bless her. And then when she called me this fall and asked me, sarah, would you like to come speak? I thought, holy smokes, look at the way God works, right? So here we are. Me, this is me telling you some of the things I've done over the years and some of the things that I see so many other boutique owners do that gets us in a bind that honestly, we laugh because we think that boutique owner back in 2005 that was running the business without the Internet, a lot of us are in the same position today. We're running a business without efficient tools and a mindset for growth. So let's get into this. Five non negotiable elements of running a successful retail business. One, time management. I know this sounds like something you've all heard about, but it is in all honesty the key to productivity. Because like I said so often, I see boutique owners doing things and I talk them through processes and they are starting an item or they're starting a project, but they're not finishing it, or they're doing something but they're not doing it very efficiently. And next thing you know, they might come in at 8 o' clock in the morning, but it's 11 and they have not accomplished anything. So stop spinning your wheels, get it done right the first time. Build a business rather than a hobby. We know growth is going to be hard, it's going to be bumpy, right? A lot of people hear me say, you know those people, those boutique owners that, you know, they're walking on magic. You see them, you see them on social, whatever it is, and you're like, holy smokes, that's who I want to be. They're on top of the mountain, right? Well, they didn't get there, they didn't land there, they climbed up that mountain just like you're climbing up the mountain today and they fell and backlogged and they kept on trucking and there they are. Right. But do they all stay there? No, they don't. 24 hours in a day. Does anybody in this room have more than that? No, that fits. That's never going to change. The lady that I used to work for back in 1993, same 24 hours, right? That lady that you see, the girl, the young girl walking around, the influencer, the boutique owner that you think is killing it, she has the same 24 hours. Rachel Hollis has the same 24 hours. We all do. It's all we're gonna get. It's what we do with that. Right? So I hear a lot of times people say, I don't have enough time to do my books. I don't have. We don't have time for a team meeting. Well, do you have time to sweep your sidewalk? Yes. I mean, this is a real thing. Who owns a brick and mortar store? Do you have time to get the dead flies out of the window? Yeah, you do, because it looks awful, right? Well, you have to make time for all these things and all that stuff has to fit into 24 hours. And hopefully you get time to eat, sleep, hopefully exercise, spend time with family, friends, people you love, people that fill your bucket. Right. So non negotiable. Be efficient with your time. One little task that I challenge you guys to do and it's very elementary. I'm not standing up here as a rocket science. I'm telling you, this is extremely elementary stuff. Take a 24 hour window time block and write out all the stuff that you want to do and put them in order. What is most important to you? Is it couch time with your kids? You know, is it book work? Is it buying new inventory? Is it scrolling on Instagram? You know, be very mindful of how much time we spend sitting there flipping through that. And if you can block that out and just come take an assessment of that, it's just a really good, you know, puts you in your place really fast. Two iPhones, it tells you how much screen time you have, right? You know, what do you do when you look at that and all of a sudden you're like, yikes, that was a lot, right? Do we do anything about it? Do something about it. Make sure your time is managed properly. Ultimately, we say this all the time at the boutique Hub. We want to make sure you're running a business, a boutique business, not a hobby. So this is when it gets really tough, a self check. Do we pay Ourselves. I'm not going to ask you guys to raise your hands, but from my coaching experience, I know it's not very many of y' all in this room that consistently pay themselves. Do you feel confident in your business right now? As you are sitting here and your business is happening back home, wherever it is, do you feel confident in what's happening? When you woke up this morning, did you jump into your analytics? Did you take a look at things? Are you looking at your store video camera to see what your staff's doing? You know, how comfortable do you feel being gone? Are you paying your bills on time? That phone, when it rings, does it make you cringe? Do you feel comfortable about it? Did you come to market with an investing plan? That investing plan is really important, guys. Notice I'm not saying buying plan. Did any of you guys come to market to buy and that's it? Or did y' all come to invest in an item that you're gonna take back and sell at a profit? What are we doing? Are we investing in items for higher return? Are we. Are we the end of the buying cycle? We're investing. Gotta have that mindset that we're investing, right? Do you have your inventory broken up into classifications? I say this fits under the time management schedule because this is extremely important. If we don't have our inventory broken up in classifications, how do we know what to invest in? Right. If we didn't come to market with an investment plan, how do we know where we should go? How do we know how we're going to spend that eight hours that we're at market? Are we just aimlessly going to walk around and be like, oh, that's cute. Oh, that's really cute. I say that because that was me. Sorry. That was me going back up here to. Do you pay yourself? Like I said, I'm very transparent. When I realized that I was not running a business, it was a really, really scary day for me. It was tax time. I got my taxes back. You know, I had to go have my husband sign these. And I've been. Oh, man, I've been pretty prideful. I have not been very honest with him. I make all sorts of excuses. And those of you that are in the hub, you always hear, I say, you cannot deposit excuses. That doesn't happen. So he's sitting there watching the game, and I thought that was prime time. Just slide the old tax return in there. And he was just gonna sign it and hand it back, right? And he did. He signed it, but then he kept it And I couldn't very well jump in his lap and grab it back out of there. So I sat there for a second and just hoped that something awesome was gonna happen in the game and he was gonna hand me tacks, return back, but that did not. So break in, the action happens. And all of a sudden, he does this. Now, my husband is a financial planner. He's an investor. Yeah, yeah. He does risk management. Now, keep in mind, I've been in business for quite a while. We did not have very much communication about this, did we? He saw me taking pictures on Social. He saw me going off to Vegas. He saw people in town be like, I just love your story. You do such a nice job. We were in the paper. We got awards in the community. Da, da, da, da. Life was awesome, right? I mean, is anybody in here on board with me on this? Or am I, like, the only fish in the sea, right? So he does this. He looks at it silent, and I am just sweating. And then he looks up at me, and I still can feel that in my bones, right? And. And he's like, what the is going on? And I'm like, oh, honey. Well, I just think it's best that we reinvest everything back into business, and we gotta spend money to make money and the whole deal. And he just said, this is your thing. You're very smart. You have an mba. I'm gonna trust you to figure this out, and I'm gonna support you and I'm gonna help you, because next year, it's gonna look different. I'm like, yes, it is. Yes, sir, it is. It sure is. You bet. See you later. Oh, my gosh. I was just like, what are you doing, Sarah? What was I doing? I was coming out here. I was going to Lion King. I was going to O. I was eating steak. I was. I was living high life. I was jumping on fashion Go every other morning, you know? I was like, oh, okay, shoot, that looks really bad. Our sales racks over half of our store. Maybe we should open a second location because we have so much inventory. No, guys, that was a true just come to Jesus moment to me. Like, get your act together. Right? So I decided it all started with paying myself. You guys might think at that point, you're like, seriously, you didn't have enough money to be paying your bills, Right? But you're gonna pay yourself. Absolutely. Because nobody else was showing up earlier than I was. Nobody else was standling there. Nobody else was answering the tough questions. Nobody else's name was on any of those line of credits or the grant or anything like that. Nobody else was gonna. I was. Nobody else was gonna answer to my husband. That was gonna be me. Yeah. So I decided if I'm gonna do all that, I'm gonna pay myself because I know me, and I know what I'm motivated by. And I put. I started out with 300 bucks a month. Not a big deal. Who cares, right? But it was. I was $300 I wasn't gonna go spend on fashion go. Or $300 I wasn't gonna spend on a show ticket in Vegas. I was making sure I took care of myself first, knowing I still had all this other stuff I had to do. Right. But at the end of the day, I would walk into my store a little bit happier, you know, a little bit more confident, A little bit more like, you know what, honey? Actually, here's. There's $300 check I just put in our bank account. I know it's not much, but that's. I'm contributing. I am contributing. These are baby steps. So self check for yourself. Whatever it is, you own it, you earn it. Reward yourself. Right? It'll change your mindset. I promise you it will. That first $300 sale I'd make every month, I mean, I'd go in the back room and do a happy dance like, yeah, I just earned my paycheck. I mean, I had girls that were making, you know, back then, they were making 10 bucks an hour. That was big time. And I'm like, stinks. They're making so much more than I am. And they're the ones, you know, complaining all the time. But whatever. That's a whole different topic. But nonetheless, pay yourself non negotiable, guys. Non negotiable. Yeah. You wouldn't show up for anybody else and work as hard as you do without getting a paycheck. Right. You'd walk real fast. All right. Building a team. I talked about this a little bit. Was my husband on my team? He was on my team. When I started communicating with him, he was really on my team. As a silent person in the background. He just didn't know how bad of a team he was on. Right. You can't do it on your own. So I want to talk about actual employees. Who has employees? Who has stress when it comes to employees? Right. Who doesn't have employees because of the stress that you have? Right. I know, I get it. All right. I'm going to put this in sports terms because I'm a sports buff. As a coach, you are the communicator you're the mentor, you're the leader, and you're the listener, Right? When you hire somebody on, it's important. It's imperative that you bring them up to speed on what is happening, what your goals are, what your expectations are, all these kind of things. And I say these things and please don't just erase them. Like no big deal. I already know this. Do we know it and are we doing it? Because I'll be very honest, I would hire people and I have them fill out the paperwork and I'd be like, alright, there you go. Yep, there's a couple customers. Just go wait on them. Oh yeah, point of sale system. Yep, I'll walk you through that, all this stuff. But I would never actually help them understand why are we doing this the way we're doing this? Why is it so important that those whys are not in my school window, Right? Because if those flies are there, the customers don't want to come in. It doesn't care how many beautiful products we have inside the store. But if the front of the store looks bad, if there's weeds growing up through the sidewalk, whatever it is, they're not coming in. Or they've already, they've already got an idea in their head what we're selling, what we do in there, right? I'm a big believer in training, testing, reviewing and repeating the ttrr. I preach about this in retail boot camp. I work with this in depth in all my coaching, whether it's basketball or rodeo, whatever. I coach ttrr. You cannot just teach somebody to do something once. Basketball fans in here, anybody, anybody play anybody else have the luxury of coaching fourth grade girls basketball ever those girls in fourth grade, third grade, whatever it is, teaching them to do a layup. Taught him one time to forget about it. No, those girls now are on varsity. What do we start every practice with? Layups Every time your kids or your employees that you brought in your, in your store taught them how to do a return on time, 1st of December, then you got busy, then you left for Christmas, whatever it was, that poor girl standing in there on December 26 and in walks that customer, right? The customer that wants return, the customer that wants everything. And you got that poor young girl that you trained one time 30 days ago on a return, trying to keep her happy, trying to keep you happy, trying to understand the point of sale system, trying to make sure she's doing all this stuff right. And she's sweating bullets, right? And you're like, well, I trained you. No, the thing Is that girl, the fourth grade girl? I gave her a basketball, intended her to put the purple. I'm sorry, not purple, the orange basketball through the hoop. For what, A clap? A good job. Yet we teach that fourth grade girl to do layups over and over and over and over again. That girl that we just entrusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars of our inventory in our name, in our brand, in our business. We taught her how to do a return one time, and now we're gone. Now we're sitting here in Vegas and we hope that she knows what she's doing. It doesn't make any sense, but we do it. Why do we do it? Goes back to the first part. Because time. We aren't. We're not managing our time, right? We've not implemented a process that everybody goes through a system, right? And I'm not. I am by no means shaming you guys. I'm just telling you these are things that I did and I learned from taking it a step further, communication with your team as that's non negotiable. Train them, test them, review with them, talk it through, write, repeat it. And then when you guys are steaming and hanging merchandise in the back room or updating Facebook pages or covers or whatever it is you're doing with your team, walking the warehouse floor, just talk to them. Just talk to them. What's on their mind? How do they feel about their team? How do they feel about their job right now, taking it a step further, what is the goal? Do you have a goal for each staff member? Again, the basketball team? Is that point guard's role the same as the forwards? Is that point guard's role? You know, she's carrying a lot of burden, right? She's got to bring the ball forward. She's got to break the press. She's got all. She's got to make the play. She's got to call the plays, right? We're setting her up in for success in a different way. Have we talked her through that? She's feeling comfortable with that. Does she understand all of the roles that she's playing when she's that fourth grade girl? Like, I want to bring the ball off the floor, you know, you're like, really? That's a lot. It's a lot of pressure, right? Same as that girl that's we're gonna work and she's gonna be there on Black Friday, small business Saturday, you know, these are the things we're going to deal with. How about the day after Christmas with the returns, right? And all of A sudden all the sales start, all that stuff. We have to communicate all those with them. I always talk about this, and this comes from the Great Game of Business. It's an amazing book. An amazing book. The Great Game of Business. It also talks about a basketball team and a coach is sending five kids out there and saying, all right, go win. That's it. What are we telling them? Go win, right? Just like we tell our customer or our staff, go make sales. We have got to make sales. If we don't sell stuff, we don't make money. If I don't make money, I can't pay you. Right? Okay, so basketball team, go score. What's the first thing they're going to ask? Which basket are we going to? Right? Which basket are we going to? How much time's on the clock, all this kind of stuff. What's that other team that we're going up against? What do they do? They're going to have questions, I promise you. Your staff has questions too. But sometimes we are not the boss that's approachable. Sometimes we're so busy that the staff doesn't feel comfortable that we can even come talk to us. I'm going to tell you a story about one of the store owner that I was coaching. And she came to me and she said, I am so embarrassed. She said, you always talk about communication with my team. And she goes, I really dropped the ball this time. I said, well, okay, tell me about it. I said, I'm sure I've heard worse. She said, I had this girl that was working for me and she was doing really good. And all of a sudden she comes in one day and she said, I can't work here anymore. My parents won't let me work here anymore. And she said, your parents won't let you work here? Why? She they said, I can't afford to work here anymore. And I'm like, okay. Immediately my mind is going, you're buying too much merchandise. You know, you're paying, you're spending your paycheck. And this lady's like, no, that's not the case. She was getting a parking ticket every time she came to work. And I went silent just like. I'm like, what? And she said, yeah, I didn't tell her where to park. And by the time she. Her shift started, our parking area was full, so I didn't tell her where to park. And she kept parking in different spots and was getting a traffic violation ticket every time. Parking ticket every time she come to work. And her parents found them in the glove box and they were furious. So a lot of us are like, well, why didn't she come to the boss and say, where should I park? I keep getting a parking ticket. Right, well, put yourself in. A 16 year old body who's a little bit insecure, who just doesn't feel like they're fitting in, right? And the Boss is going 1,000 miles an hour in every different direction. Next.